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The House That Love Built — Before It Was Gone

Written by LEANNE SHAPTON and
NIKLAS MAAKJULY 4, 2016

For Monica Vitti, Eileen Gray and Frank Lloyd Wright, their homes were the culmination of passionate affairs. And the places they ended.

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A 1971 photograph of La Cupola, a house in Sardinia built by the Italian architect Dante Bini in the late ‘60s for the actress Monica Vitti and the director Michelango Antonioni. They lived there together for three years before taking other lovers and separating.
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Dante Bini

SOME OF MY FAVORITE STORIES are stories of houses. “The Spoils of Poynton,” about a house full of beloved antiquities. “Rebecca,” about a house haunted by a first wife. Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”: a house that takes over parenting. I love James Lees-Milne’s stories of National Trust houses, postwar stories of houses built on dynasties and coming apart. Then there is the special house, the one built on love, for a muse, a mistress, an adored spouse. In Virginia Woolf’s brief masterpiece “A Haunted House,” the ghosts are content, the walls of the house thrumming with whispers of peace, a happy marriage.

But so, too, can a house be haunted by a disappointment, by expired love, curdled, lending an imperceptible perfume to the halls and rooms. It is the whiff we catch at open houses and estate sales, whose occupants have divorced. According to 1 Corinthians, love is patient, love is kind. According to Joy Division, love will tear us apart. What happens when a couple outgrows a house, when they wake in a beloved room to realize they don’t belong there, that they’ve been living an illustration of a dream?

My friend Niklas Maak, a writer and architecture critic, took me to a house on Sardinia where the actress Monica Vitti once lived. The house, called La Cupola, was designed and built by the Italian architect Dante Bini for Vitti and her then boyfriend, the director Michelangelo Antonioni, in the late ’60s. Vitti was in her late 30s, Antonioni was in his mid-50s. Together they had made “L’Avventura,” “La Notte,” “L’Eclisse” and “Red Desert.” I brought my watercolors and paper. As we drove up the Costa Paradiso, he explained that the current owners were journalists in Naples. The house was barely used, renovations were expensive. The electricity was shut off.

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It was beautiful. It was a wreck. It blistered on the rocky hillside: a perfect dome, gray weathered concrete and granite connected by a bridge to an eroded staircase. The day was warm and bright, the interiors were crumbling and stuffy. Some rooms contained odd bits of dusty ’60s Italian modern furniture, bright-green glazed tiles and faded taupe cushions. An Italian paperback copy of Patricia Cornwell’s “Cause of Death” was left on a kitchen countertop. Looking around the main room, it was easy to imagine Vitti stepping carefully, cinematically, barefoot down the banister-free staircase that Antonioni built to watch her descend. But by 1972, Vitti and Antonioni were at the end of their affair. I climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. The old mattress on the bed was covered in blue flowers.

As I sat down at a massive built-in dining table and laid out my watercolors I snapped at Maak, for some perceived slight. He snapped back. We bickered. He stalked out. A moment later Maak returned to the room accompanied by six strangers. They had scaled the gate and come to look at the house, too. One was the Italian Modernist architect Alberto Ponis, 83, impeccably dressed in a white safari suit and pink cravat, and his wife AnnaRita. Two were Texan, the others were German. One of them mistook me for the owner. All of us were trespassing. It was vintage Antonioni.

Maak and I flew out of Sardinia that evening, compiling a list of residences built on the foundations of love. They included Bini’s La Cupola, Eileen Gray’s E.1027 and Taliesin, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Maak pointed out that in every case the love affairs lasted just three years after the houses were completed.

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La Cupola

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The abandoned interior of La Cupola, as it looked in 2015.
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Romain Courtemanche

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AT THE NORTHERN END of the Costa Paradiso, a run-down 1970s-era vacation town in Sardinia, a concrete dome juts out from the granite cliffs, surrounded by a jungle of rock roses, gorse, olive trees and pines. Most summer tourists on the narrow coast road take little notice. But in the early 1970s, it was the setting for the love affair between Vitti and Antonioni.

The idea for the dome started with the architect Bini, who had acquired a patent for what he called a “Binishell” in 1964: a building technique that involved a house-size plastic balloon and a metal scaffolding. The balloon was covered with concrete and then inflated. When the concrete hardened, the balloon was removed and doors and windows cut into the dome. The result looked like a laboratory for eccentric experiments involving exotic magnetic forces.

The cupola functions as a labyrinth of inner and outer spaces. There are enough ideas packed into the concrete shell for two or three houses, which may have something to do with the fact that the house was envisioned by an architect and a film director. Architectonic and cinematic ideas of storytelling and space collide. The inner staircase is built of raw slabs of local granite jammed into the round interior wall. Negotiating them requires balancing, as if crossing a stream on slippery rocks. It seems a monument to danger and beauty — a theme in Antonioni’s work. Antonioni, at the foot of the staircase, could watch Vitti perform the balancing act required to get down the stairs, like a fetish scene.

A stair descends from the cupola down the red cliffs to the sea, where some say Vitti would swim naked. From the isolated cove, the house can’t be seen. Antonioni’s films have a nearly surreal precision in their approach to color and objects, as if he had ripped the milky filter off the lens to show things as they really are. In the house, everything was chosen for maximal sensory impact, including the plants, the furniture and the lighting. Aromas were emphasized: the smell of the cliffs from the open windows, of the chamomile that was embedded in the terrazzo floor, the rosemary in the interior garden. The sound of the waves is made more intense from within the silence of the concrete cupola.

Antonioni was fascinated by the writer Curzio Malaparte, who built himself a house on Capri at the end of the 1930s. Jean-Luc Godard used it as the setting for “Contempt,” starring Brigitte Bardot. Casa Malaparte is a place that intensifies physical experience to a nearly violent degree. When waves crash into the cliffs, the whole house shakes. But the cupola takes the opposite approach: It’s an observatory for things that are so tiny and unremarkable they might otherwise go unnoticed.

Vitti and Antonioni holidayed in the house for three years. In 1972, Antonioni met Enrica Fico on the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. She had been invited to stay in a commune there, and worked as an artist’s model. In 1974, Vitti met her future husband, the director Roberto Russo.

EILEEN GRAY WAS 51 YEARS OLD when she completed her first private residence. It was a white Modernist villa on a slope descending to the sea in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, a small village on the Côte d’Azur. Her lover, the Romanian architect and editor of L’Architecture Vivante, Jean Badovici, was 36 when they moved in, in 1929. The house was situated between the train tracks and the beach, among rocks and pine trees with a view of the bay of Monaco. Seen from the sea, it resembles a white yacht anchored behind reddish rocks. In designing the house Gray adopted a number of precepts formulated by the architect Le Corbusier in the mid-1920s. The structure stands on thin stilts, the windows form a horizontal band. Badovici was a close friend of Le Corbusier, and Le Corbusier and Gray knew each other from Paris. She was nine years Le Corbusier’s senior and one of the best-known furniture designers of her time. But Gray was the darker of the two. She was a close friend of the occult celebrity Aleister Crowley and had an open affair with the singer Damia. The two women cruised the boulevards of Paris wearing Lanvin, a panther curled up in the back seat of their car.

Though Gray’s house has a clinical air when seen from the outside (painted pure white like many early Modernist buildings), it is unexpectedly dim inside. The effect is of slipping into progressively deeper water, as one reaches the house’s most intimate corners, which are decorated in dark blue or black. E.1027, as the house is known, nods to Le Corbusier only at first sight. The spiral of the stairs, to Gray, represented both a physical form and metaphor — and she used it as a basis for a critique of Le Corbusier’s notion of the house as a “machine for living,” a phrase he had coined. A house, Gray once wrote, is “not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man — his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation.”

“The poverty of modern architecture,” she later added, “stems from the atrophy of sensuality.”

The bedroom of E.1027, the Mediterranean residence Eileen Gray built in 1929 for her lover, the architect Jean Badovici.
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National Museum of Ireland, photo by Eileen Gray

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The main room in 2015, with a Gray-designed chair, daybed and adjustable tables and a mural by Le Corbusier.
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Paul Raftery

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Gray’s house sinks into the landscape. It is emphatically not a living machine; it is not informed by hygienic brightness. It is packed with lovingly executed details, including a trolley for taking a gramophone outside. Shutters filter the Mediterranean light. Everything was made to contain love, even the name of the building. “E.1027” is code for an affair of the heart. The “E” stood for Eileen, the numbers corresponding to letters of the alphabet. (“10” for “J,” the tenth letter of the alphabet, referring to Jean. “2” for “B” [Badovici], and “7” for “G” [Gray].) Her name holds his.

But Badovici only occasionally used the house. Gray separated from him in 1932, left E.1027 to him and built herself a new house in Castellar. At Badovici’s invitation, Le Corbusier holidayed in E.1027 with his wife, Yvonne, and in 1938 to 1939 painted the interior walls with erotic murals. He called them “a gift” for his hostess, but Gray saw them as an act of vandalism, almost of revenge. Later, during World War II, German soldiers used the walls for target practice.

Badovici died in 1956. Le Corbusier, who had built himself a wooden shack, the Cabanon, within sight of E.1027, always wanted to acquire the house. Finally a friend of his, the wealthy Swiss gallerist and furniture dealer Marie-Louise Schelbert, bought the villa. Gray never returned to the house. Le Corbusier would drown in the sea near E.1027, in 1965. Schelbert’s gynecologist, Peter Kägi, a morphine addict, was murdered there in 1996. Over time, the house deteriorated. In recent years, E.1027 was restored and last year was made open to the public. The sea, seen from the windows on a bright summer day, looks remarkably dark.

TALIESIN WAS A REFUGE. In 1911, when Frank Lloyd Wright built this house near Spring Green, Wis., where his mother’s family had lived since the Civil War, he was persona non grata in Chicago, and so was the woman for whom he built the house, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They had met in 1903 when Cheney’s husband commissioned Wright to build their new family home in Oak Park, Ill. The house was finished within a year, and Wright and Cheney began an affair. They kept it secret, but in 1909 they left their spouses and embarked on a trip to Europe. There, Mamah (now Borthwick again) worked on the English translation of “The Morality of Woman,” by the Swedish feminist and suffragette Ellen Key.

Upon their return, the couple’s story played out in the press. Their open, nonmarital relationship was already scandalous enough. That Borthwick was a combative, self-confident feminist was even more outrageous. Local newspapers accused Wright of bringing shame to the neighborhood. His professional reputation suffered considerable damage, and for years afterward, apart from one major project in Chicago, he received no significant commissions.

Wright decided to go to Wisconsin with Borthwick. He sketched a house in 1911 that had three wings, with spaces for work, living and agricultural pursuits. It was a typical Prairie School building, with a low-pitched roof with overhanging eaves, like a hat with the brim pulled down over the forehead to hide the wearer’s identity. Its form echoed the flatness of the plains, and the natural limestone outcroppings of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area plateaus. Like a cave dwelling, with a huge fireplace tracing an aesthetic of simple beginnings, the house combined the American pioneer idea of promise with a very personal story of self-renewal.

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An early portrait of Wright.
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Courtesy of the Taliesin Preservation Society/Wisconsin Historical Society

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A portrait of Borthwick, who was killed along with six other people on the property.
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Wisconsin Historical Society

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Wright’s bedroom essentially as it looks today.
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Trunk Archive

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Wright built the house on a hill he had been fond of since his school days. He named it “Taliesin” after a Welsh bard. The word itself means “shining forehead.” From late 1911 onward he lived there with Borthwick.

In August, of 1914, while Wright was in Chicago, a staff worker named Julian Carlton set fire to the building and murdered Borthwick and her two children, who were visiting during their summer vacation. He also killed laborer Thomas Brunker, draftsman Emil Brodelle, gardener David Lindblom and Ernest Weston, the son of foreman William Weston. Wright eventually rebuilt and enlarged the property several times. He designed his famous Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum from Taliesin and, in 1940, the complex became part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Wright died in 1959.

In 1968, Deep Purple put out a record called “The Book of Taliesyn,” featuring a cover of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” It begins with a quote from the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a monument to careful confidence.

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The house’s courtyard.
Credit
Wisconsin Historical Society

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The dining area at Taliesin, the three-winged house Frank Lloyd Wright built in 1911 near Spring Green, Wis., after his affair with the noted feminist Mamah Borthwick Cheney made him virtually unemployable elsewhere.
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Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society